Kenji Bunch: Sunday, April 28

One of Portland’s brightest composers escapes from New York.

Like it is in everything else these days,
Brooklyn is all the rage in classical music. It’s an old story, really:
For a century at least, if you wanted to be at the forefront of
contemporary classical music, you moved to New York.

And yet, one of
Brooklyn’s best musicians is reversing the brain drain and moving back
to his hometown of Portland. To welcome back Kenji Bunch, the Portland
Youth Philharmonic’s chamber orchestra, Camerata PYP, will perform his
2011 work, Supermaximum, at its April 28 concert. And next month,
the Corvallis Youth Symphony will premiere his new piano concerto,
performed by Bunch’s wife, Monica Ohuchi.

It’s an appropriate
homecoming for Bunch, 39. He played viola in PYP—the nation’s oldest
youth orchestra—for five years before heading off to Juilliard in New
York 22 years ago and becoming one of the country’s best-known young
composers and arrangers. The Wilson High School alum’s energetic,
original music—increasingly influenced by pop, world and other
nonclassical styles—has been performed by important ensembles like the
Eroica Trio and more than 40 orchestras, and he plays often with
experimental, rock, jazz and other nonclassical musicians, even in
Broadway shows. He’s that rare composer who can make a living in music
while living at the epicenter of American classical music.

So why leave?

“You realize that
certain things the rest of the country takes for granted are luxuries
here,” Bunch says, “like a backyard and having space to be able to go
out and play.” He also realized he doesn’t have to live in New York to
maintain a career. “You get conditioned to thinking that you need this
New York presence to be legitimate or something,” he says. “That may
have been true 20 years ago, but with the Internet, it’s now less the
case. And other parts of the country have really emerged as compelling
centers for the arts, and I really believe that Portland is one of
them.”

Bunch
has returned to Portland at least twice a year for performances and
family visits. “What excites me about what I’m finding out about the
music world there now is that it’s not, ‘Oh, look at little Portland
doing what N.Y. is doing.’ It’s the opposite,” he says. “Portland seems
to be setting the trends, inventing new ways of presenting classical and
classically based music, and new ways of finding audiences and
presenting this music to the public. And there’s no denying that it’s
working—there’s a real buzz. I think it’s something really special, and
I’d like to be a part of that.”

Bunch increasingly
performs his own music and plans to do more of that here, and the
veteran music teacher also hopes to work with young musicians via the
Youth Philharmonic. “I want to do what I can to help nurture young
musicians,” he says. “I feel lucky that I’ve had the career I’ve had so
far, and it’s been due in large part to a lot of fortunate circumstances
that began when I was a kid in Portland. I want to give back to that
community that helped me get where I am.”

SEE IT: The Camerata PYP concert, featuring a performance of Kenji Bunch’s Supermaximum, is at the Wieden+Kennedy Building, 224 NW 13th Ave., portlandyouthphil.org, on Sunday, April 28. 4 pm. $15-$223.